Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 03.djvu/163

Barclay before or after his university career, while he was still ‘in youth,’ he resided at Croydon in Surrey, of which place repeated mention is made in ‘Eclogue I.’

Barclay's student life had, according to his own testimony in the ‘Ship of Fools’ (sec. ‘Of unprofytable Stody’), been full of ‘foly;’ and it has been supposed that this may have induced him to travel abroad before his entrance into holy orders. The shepherd Cornix, by whom in his ‘Eclogues’ Barclay evidently, as a rule, designates himself, speaks of Rome, Paris, Lyons, and Florence as towns which he visited among many others, when he saw the world in his youth. We know of no authority for Mackenzie's assertion that he also travelled in the Netherlands and in Germany. In any case his years of travel must have fallen in a most active period of the continental Renascence, when Englishmen were freely gathering in the learning which they were to acclimatise at home. It is impossible to determine how much of his scholarship Barclay acquired in England. He seems to have had but a slight acquaintance with Greek. Of his knowledge of Latin poets his ‘Eclogues’ were to furnish ample evidence; of other writers he specially quotes Seneca. But the monument proper of his Latin scholarship is his translation of Sallust's ‘Bellum Jugurthinum,’ which he published at some date unknown in obedience to the wish of the Duke of Norfolk. It is prefaced by a dedication to this nobleman, in which the author speaks of ‘the understandyng of latyn’ as being ‘at this time almost contemned by gentylmen,’ and by a Latin letter, dated from [King's] Hatfield in Hertfordshire, to John Veysy, bishop of Exeter. His familiarity with French he showed by composing for publication in 1521, again at the command of the Duke of Norfolk, a tractate ‘Introductory to write and to pronounce Frenche,’ which is mentioned by Palsgrave in ‘L'Esclaircissement de la langue Françoise,’ printed in 1530. A copy of Barclay's treatise, probably unique, exists in the Bodleian.

In the early years of the sixteenth century the union between churchmanship and learning was still hardly less close in England than it was in that group of continental scholars, among whom Sebastian Brant was already a prominent figure. Soon after Barclay's return to England he must have been ordained by Bishop Cornish, through whom he was appointed a priest in the college of Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire, of which the pluralist bishop held the wardenship from 1490 to 1511. The college of secular priests, of which Barclay was a member, was founded in 1337 by John Grandisson, bishop of Exeter; the manor and hundred had been obtained by him in exchange from the dean and chapter of Rouen, to whom they had been granted by Edward the Confessor. It was here that Barclay, in 1508, accomplished the work to which he owes his chief fame, the English verse translation of the ‘Ship of Fools,’ first published by Pynson in December 1509, with a dedication by the author to Bishop Cornish on the back of the first leaf. In this dedication he speaks of the work as ‘meorum primiciæ laborum quæ in lucem eruperunt,’ but he had previously, in 1506, put forth without his name a book called the ‘Castell of Laboure,’ a translation from the French poet, best known as a dramatist, Pierre Gringoire's ‘Le Chateau de Labour’ (1499), a moral allegory which, though of no novel kind, was speedily reprinted by a second publisher.

During his residence at Ottery St. Mary Barclay made some other friends and enemies. Among the former was a priest, John ‘Bishop by name,’ his obligations to whom he warmly attests in the ‘Ship of Fools’ (sec. ‘The descripcion of a wyse man’), gravely playing on his name as that of ‘the first ouersear of this warke.’ A certain ‘mayster Kyrkham,’ to whose munificence and condescension he offers a tribute in the same poem (sec. ‘Of the extorcion of Knyghtis’), professing himself, doubtless in a figurative sense only, ‘his chaplayne and bedeman whyle my lyfe shall endure,’ is with much probability supposed to be Sir John Kirkham, high sheriff of Devonshire in the years 1507 and 1523 (see the authorities cited by i. xxxvii, and cf. as to the family of Kirkham, Magna Britannia, part i. ccii–cciii). In the same section of the poem he departs from his general practice of abstaining from personal attacks, in order to inveigh against a fat officer of the law, ‘Mansell of Otery, for powlynge of the pore;’ elsewhere (sec. ‘Inprofytable bokes’) the parsons of ‘Honyngton’ (Honiton) and Clyst are glanced at obliquely as time-serving and sporting clergymen; and to another section (‘Of hym that nought can and nought wyll lerne’) an ‘addicion’ is made for the benefit of eight neighbours of the translator's, secondaries (priest-vicars) of Ottery St. Mary, without whose presence the ‘ship’ would be incomplete.

Barclay's residence in Devonshire may have come to an end with Bishop Cornish's resignation of the wardenship of Ottery St. Mary in 1511, which was followed two years later by the bishop's death. Remi-